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Comment by stasomatic | Hacker News Reader

It's not a time saver in that you, as an employee, don't get more time to yourself. You get to work more. Can you walk up to your boss and tell them that you are going to start working 20 hours a week instead of 40?

I use these things daily, not against this kind of "AI" at all.

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You're not wrong of course, but removing the tedious parts of a job can be really nice. I still work the same hours of course, but now I get to work on things that are more meaningful, more design and architecture oriented, and less about the grind of tedium. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions out there, so I don't want to generalize, but I do suspect there are a number of people in a similar situation as me.

>removing the tedious parts of a job can be really nice

Sure. For me AI removes the parts of programming work that I like the most, and "gives" me more time to do thing I consider tedious, like solving human problems, achieving consensus in the team, attending meetings.

How can we deal with this mental overload? There are only so many things that I can keep in my head.

Your job was to deliver Project X and you did it in half the time. What do you do with the other half? Your job was to deliver X. Now what? Extra vacation time? Just musing.

Honestly, I know several devs who do chores around the house or even play video games while AI does the bulk of the heavy lifting. If nobody cares or even realizes, does it matter? (To be clear, they all work remotely.)

There's nothing that will save your employment time because any employer will want to maximize what they get from you. This applies to literally any innovation past, present and future.

For self-employed people, it allows them to focus on other problems. I know people who would be bankrupt without AI now because development time was crushing their company and they couldn't afford to hire others. Now they can spend more time in marketing and sales. AI will make some business that weren't profitable in the past viable.

For people who program for leisure, self-consumption or otherwise don't have a major income pressure, it is objectively a huge time saver.

For people who program for leisure, self-consumption or otherwise don't have a major income pressure, it is objectively a huge time saver.

I've had much enjoyment recreating my frequently used utilities on macOS. It's not about saving money, it's costing me more than to keep my subscriptions active, it's more about tailoring things to myself and keeping BPMs up.

There's nothing that will save your employment time because any employer will want to maximize what they get from you. This applies to literally any innovation past, present and future.

A personal anecdote from 2 decades ago which hunts me till today.

I was at a smallish firm in NYC, less than 50 people. I ran the "IT department" which included a couple of devs, DTP folks and one customer support underling who I backed up when needed.

We fixed all the printer problems, all the network shares, everything was quiet. I get called into the corner office and am told, "tell the help desk dude to sweep the floors as they are not doing anything". And, I really liked that boss. It's a different mindset.

If you’re a contractor, sure, same as always.

If you’re an employee, you are selling a quantity of your time, not your results. Of course you will have to work the same amount of time.

Your issue is with employment as a general concept, wherein the employer reaps any efficiency gains, not the worker.

You can if you don't tell them :-D

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